Aurelia Knapp - Young journalist changes world one story at a time

This fall, the 18-year old 2013 Lincoln Park Academy graduate is headed to the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism, the mecca of journalism students and journalists everywhere. The aspiring broadcast journalist is determined to raise people’s awareness about the truth about life around them, and is already using her communications and dramatic abilities to better lives.

The Port St. Lucie teen, an International Baccalaureate graduate, also has a flair for communication revealed by her work in drama; she’s won awards in regional and local dramatic competitions. She’s found her voice on-stage and behind the scenes in many school and county shows, including the student-written and produced Portraits of Courage, a story of breast cancer survival.

For the past year, Ria served as volunteer marketing intern for a regional magazine, developing her writing and organizational skills as she learned her way around the charitable community, working events to benefit organizations like CASTLE, the Humane Society and Habitat for Humanity.

But, this wasn’t Ria’s first experience giving to others. Through her church youth group, as a high school freshman she served with Next Step Ministries, discovering firsthand the stories and the faces attached to the statistics of HIV and AIDS-affected Bahamians.

Ria tells of one young boy who touched her heart, Daniel, who was about 10. “Daniel loved to draw, so on our last day working in the Bahamian camp, I asked him to draw me a picture for my journal. He made me promise to wait until I got back to Florida to look at the picture. When I got home, I saw that he had drawn me as an Incredible Hulk-like figure with BamBam, the nickname a friend gave me, written on the muscles. Below it, he wrote ‘I miss you already. Love, Daniel.’”

“You don’t meet little kids like Daniel spending your whole life on the Internet or at the mall,” said Ria. “There are people out there that we need to help, but they won’t be knocking on your door. At the same time, Daniel taught me a lesson, too; to appreciate everything I have and to stop taking life so seriously. And I saw myself through his eyes, as a girl who could get anything done.”

Ria’s decision to become a journalist came shortly her trip to the Bahamas, when she read the book No Choirboy, a collection of interviews about inmates on death row who were convicted of their crimes (all murder) before the age of 18.

Says Ria, “These societal outcasts were people, not just the monsters that the media plays them out to be. Besides some majorly poor decisions, we’re not all that different.”

“That’s why I want to be a journalist,” she continues. “I want to meet the outcasts, to know their stories and their faces and their hearts, and I want to tell the world about them. I want people to realize that there is a world outside of their town that they should know, because it has blessed me immensely getting to know it.”

Whether she’s serving food for the annual Thanksgiving Feed for Charity, on stage playing a character, or helping children like Daniel learn to see their own gifts, Ria Knapp plans to keep changing the world, one story at a time.